Time

Today my brother Danny called me. I can’t remember the last time he called, but I was supposed to help him move some kind of media center into storage. The last time I was supposed to help him I kind of lost track of the time and forgot I was supposed to help him that day. He always forgot to write down my cell phone number, or he would have got a hold of me because all I was doing was shopping for bananas, apples, and oranges. That seemed to take up my entire attention span. Hence, I forgot I was supposed to help my brother.

So, anyway, I get to his condo and I immediately see the Aztec calendar/clock. “Is that the same clock that we had in our basement at 2509 W. Marquette Road?” I asked. “It is,” he said. I immediately took a picture of it with my digital camera that I had brought along for just that purpose. Well, not specifically to take a picture of the Aztec calendar/clock that used to be in our basement at 2509 W. Marquette Road, because I didn’t know it still existed, much less that my brother Danny had it hanging in his living room wall at this very moment.

Lately, I’ve been taking my camera with me to more places just in case I see something worth photographing. Danny tells me that he took the clock hands off because they had somehow broke. Gee, I wonder how? I’m surprised that the clock survived at all because we used to play very rough in the basement. Things were always flying in our basement and caroming off the ceiling or the walls–if not objects that were never designed to fly like pillows, sofa cushions, or books, then human bodies such as my brothers or me.

Now that I look at the picture of the Aztec calendar/clock, I wonder: Who was the genius who thought of putting a clock in the center of the Aztec calendar. I’m not sure where it came from, but my mother probably brought back as a souvenir on one of her many trips to Mexico. No matter how many times my mother went to Mexico, she always brought back more souvenirs. She wanted to move and live in Mexico, but since she couldn’t, she was bringing Mexico back to Chicago, one souvenir at a time.